A case study on the evolution of Chinese religious symbols from talismanic paraphernalia to Taoist liturgy

The mid-fifteenth-century Taoist Canon (Zhengtong daozang正統道藏) contains five specimens of a religious artefact called "Great Peace Symbol" ("Taiping fu" 太平符), dispersed between five texts spanning about a millennium. The introduction to this paper discusses the meaning of the Chinese wordfu符 and its most widely used English rendition, "talisman". The article briefly presents the source of each specimen, attempts a deconstruction of its morphology, and analyses itsmodus operandi, thus providing a basic methodological model to outline the historical evolution of the category of "fu" artefacts from early medieval portable devices endowed with specific apotropaic functions - like charms and amulets - to multipurpose ritual implements designed for use within the framework of early modern Taoist liturgy. The epilogue introduces a sixth specimen, differently named but morphologically and functionally related to the latest three "Great Peace Symbols

Archaeology · Art · Deconstruction (building) · Epistemology · Fifteenth · Linguistics · Literature · Liturgy · Meaning (existential) · Symbol (formal) · Chinese history and philosophy · Classics · Engineering · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy

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